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9-26-01

Emails from Manhattan

By Jay Rosen

The following is excerpted from a series of journal entries Jay Rosen began sending to the Blue Ear Forum (http://www.blueear.com) on September 11, the day of the attack.  He is chairman of the Journalism Department at New York University, the author of What Are Journalists For? and a participant in CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum.

Manhattan, Sep. 11.  pm.

Terrorism, we all intuitively understand, is not about the explosion, or even the dead.   It is an act of communication; it traffics in symbols. In the miserable cliché of the media age, the terrorist wants to “send a message.”  The medium is not the bomb, or the plane, or the television set.  It’s your own mind that “conducts” the terror.

It is impossible to overstate the psychological effect today’s events will have on the people of New York, even beyond the immense loss of life, and utter chaos downtown. The World Trade Center Towers were a symbol of the city, of course. But so is the humble bagel a “symbol” of New York.  Far more than that, the Towers over-awed us.

Secular totems for a secular world, they were all about the might, power, richness and unlimited confidence of the civilization that gave rise to them.   In other words, they were like religious sites.  No matter how close you were to the Towers, even directly underneath them on the broad plaza at ground level, the buildings looked very far away, twin abstractions against the sky.  They were almost ineffable in that way.  They had no depth, like the blue in the sky has no depth.  It was not possible to feel close to them.  I’m not sure anyone ever loved them.  But did we have confidence in them?  We did, we did.

Manhattan, Sep. 12 am

An enormous act of hate slammed into my sky yesterday, and of all things big in this biggest event, it’s hate that stands out for me today.  New York is a great city because it is a liberal city, and also big, strong, powerful.  Liberalism breeds the dynamism that holds people here—that, and the skyline.  People know how to hate in New York, and they do.  But they also know that they have not yet figured out how to live with hate.  Besides, no one hates the skyline.

Here we understand in minute precision that to live is also to “let live.”  The density of our environment tells us to maintain that saving space between ourselves and the private demons of others.  Two of us can be a quarter inch apart, or touching, and we preserve each other’s space.  This happens on a packed subway car every morning, but the subways only work because our liberalism does.

Wanna live?  Then let live.  In New York, that’s survival.  We don’t need posters or candidates to tell us about it.  For we’re aware of the power that one crazy has to wreck a thousand lives, and aware that he’s only inches away, in those undisturbed demons.  “Don’t push me cuz I’m close to the edge.”  We remember that song.

If the fragility of the social peace is one reason we’re liberals, the fragility of the city systems is another.  To live here, especially in Manhattan, is to live inches away from total urban crisis all the time.  One transformer, one water tunnel, one gas main, or just one President visiting the UN and everything goes, all order is lost, the thing comes apart and Manhattan no longer “works.”   That’s why it holds such a powerful place in the imagination of disaster, from King Kong to Independence Day.  It’s so easy to imagine New York’s destruction.  Trust me, we do that all the time.

When those airplanes slammed in, tearing a hole in the skyline, they were overturning the mental furniture of the cosmopolitan mind.  Today, we have to begin the grim work of understanding that liberalism itself is hated.  The city is closed for business, and so some of us have the time.

I can’t agree with Martin Brown that the Towers were symbols of financial might, but not democracy, although everything else he told us about the present moment is powerful, urgent, vivid and real.  Maybe across the ocean or in left wing critique the World Trade Center meant commerce, capital, and markets triumphant.  In New York we knew about all that, but here The Twins were democratic symbols too, simply because of where they stood.  On ground we know to be fragile, over a delicate social peace we preserve because we’re natural democrats: the subway car kind.  My four year-old daughter asked her mother if maybe they could be “fixed.”  My wife said she didn’t think so.

Now our common sky is ripped and smoking from the crash of someone’s public demons.  The disaster we knew how to prevent ourselves fell upon us from above.  We’d imagined it, a million times.  But then everyone here agrees: we could never imagine this.

Manhattan, Sep. 12 pm

Are New Yorkers walking around Washington Square right now, strolling smoky streets where only emergency vehicles go, are they walking slow and calm today because to be fully alive to what happened is too much—and they’d be driven mad?  Or are they calm precisely because they’re alive to the historical magnitude of the event, know what to do despite the horror of it, and therefore can’t be driven mad?  Is today’s calm our civic mask, or the very toughness of our civic wisdom?

Neither, I think.  We can be relatively cool today because we are (relatively) all on the same page in time.   This cannot be said for our attackers.   We measure historical time by a more immediate metric: the human life.  Your uncle’s life, your friends’ life, your own.  This is not the only metric available to the human mind, and when people say we’re in a war between rival systems or civilizations this is part of what they mean.

In some way we admit to not comprehending, personally, the suicide bomber is saved, rather than destroyed by killing himself.  But can we comprehend this other way culturally?  The people of this rival civilization, if it really exists, may be measuring their time in centuries.  That’s why you bomb New York: to regain Jerusalem for the ages.  To some, the towers went down in the same narrative space as the Hebrew Temple in 70 AD.  We cannot, as we say, get our minds around this.

Meanwhile, we’re counting the years left with uncles and cousins and friends under that wreckage downtown.  They are on another clock entirely, which means they assign different meaning to the loss of human life today.  Their understanding took aim at ours, and hit the center.  To learn of this yesterday was like a plane crashing inside your skull.

“The earth belongs to the living,” said our Jefferson.   Well, his is one culturally specific way of clocking things.  New Yorkers got struck by another, and a lot are dead.  The daze is wearing off.  The calm is still here.  We feel we know what time it is, we know what “our time” here on earth is worth, and what it costs when taken from us.  And we do know, as Jefferson knew: for us.

But when I turn on my television set, the narrative space shown me cannot hold the possibility that the attack also occurred on another historical clock, far away from ours, and alien to it.  The news has room for only one clock, one grammar in time.  And here we meet with the limits of America’s civic wisdom.  For what the news cannot “hold” the nation cannot behold.  On TV, it’s still one trusty frame for time.  Right now on Manhattan streets, the ruined air tells of two.

Manhattan, Sept. 16

 “Collapsed” is not the right word for what happened to the Towers; they were somehow turned to dust.  Steel beams, glass window panes, cement and gypsum board made those dark surging clouds you’ve seen on television replays.  Engineers are starting to explain how, but what engineer can explain dust that was steel and must now have in it human DNA?

Do you want to know what we think about?  That is what I think about.  Last night, I made a friend show me how he downloads video from the Web.  I felt ready to watch the Towers go down again and again.   Hannah Arendt says somewhere in her writings: “The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is at the root of all moral life.”  Show me how to download video so I can begin.

I think about ecstasy.  The ecstasy of that half-trained pilot as he approached the moment of impact and his instant transport to heaven.  What time means for me, time did not mean for him.  This much I know: there is a deep rupture there.  We call him a suicide.  They call him a martyr.  I find too much optimism in this language, which assumes our power to name things and thus define their sense.  The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is a struggle with the lie of language, which cannot hold Tuesday’s evidence or make it available to the human mind.  When I reflect on that I would sooner have poets bring me the news.

Think about this, because as a professor of journalism I have: There were more people killed in one hour this week than in all the news stories from all those years of trouble in Northern Ireland.  The time scale of one is incommensurate with the time scale of the other, although both are held to be “news.”  You can have funerals with bodies in Belfast and Gaza.  We will have our funerals in New York, but most of the bodies are somewhere in that surging cloud I’ll watch again and again on video.

Television reporters do what they can within the word games they’ve mastered, but their subject exceeds their sense.  You cannot report on a rupture in time, you can only stand near the scene and report right into it.  There is a reason candlelight vigils are silent vigils.  And there is a good moral sense in the three minutes of silence the people of The Netherlands observed this week.  They “said it all,” and when I think about thanking them tears cloud my sight.

Soon workers will be sweeping up the dust in lower Manhattan.   The traffic will eventually return.  Pedestrians will walk the streets again.  And the struggle to believe our senses will enter a new phase.   So when tomorow’s news from New York tells of the city getting back to normal, hold onto your doubts and imagine a poet with a microphone reporting live from a rupture.

Manhattan, Sep. 19

Normally I am a political writer, or let’s say I try.  But things are not normal, and neither am I.  You cannot declare that nothing will ever be the same again and then exempt your own mind.  If those Towers could collapse, why not the categories where we try to make sense of politics?  I stopped making sense of things through left and right the moment I saw for myself that New York City’s skyline was burning from the top, the moment (which took only minutes) that I realized why.

Before, it was at least conceivable in public imagination that a fire could consume a skyscraper.  But not the fall of the World Trade Center from an airborne attack by hidden enemies of your people.  There were no categories for that, no public and political space where it stood imagined by some that United States Air Force fighter jets, ready to kill, would soon be flying over Times Square if we don’t wake up and....Ask anyone who was there and looked up: this came out of the blue.  Down went the twin pillars of the skyline, and all my public categories fell.

I’m not thinking about politics proper yet.  I am thinking about saving other cities from the terrible thing that happened to mine.  Whichever party in politics can do that—left, right, middle, or parties undreamed, coalitions uncounted—that is the politics I am prepared to believe in now.  For the moment.  And I suspect many others feel this way, too.

Intuitively we know that a great city is not just an urban landscape, an exterior thing like its buildings seem to be.  The important landscape is interior.  Half the reason people come to New York is to experience the soaring height of Manhattan inside themselves, in their personal ambitions, their chances in life.  There is no point in moving here unless you seek an enlargement of some inner sense of self.

Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan and be able to say, “I live here now.”  You’ll know instantly what I mean.  Millions of us did that, got bigger.  Now we don’t know what that enlargement means.  We know the bridge walk has changed forever and become a darker thing.

Once, the Twin Towers dominated that view.

Hopes impossibly high, but real enough, are the very essence of what it means to live amid very tall buildings, especially for those who came to the Big City from provinces beyond.  We knew we were lucky.  We knew we had this big thing inside, replacing the smaller one our hometowns were.  We knew we could fail, go back defeated, but it would only be a personal failure: can’t make it there.  We never thought the high canyons above would get hit and crash into rubble and dust.

But it happened.  Now we are to dream the Big City dream all over again, with new information.

Early on in this crisis, I became aware that people writing from certain cities had a special feel for the destruction in New York.  Call it a civic emotion, globally shared.  Europe’s international cities, like London, Paris, and Berlin, are the most obvious examples in my compass, but maybe Hong Kong and Tokyo are, too.  The one I know the most about, because I have visited recently, is Amsterdam.

Like New York, an international city, with an amazing interracial poly-cultural mix.  Like New York, an irreplaceable cultural capital.  People on the streets of one fit perfectly on the streets of the other.  Both known for tolerance, for vice.  And, of course, there’s the mysterious bond with a city that was New Amsterdam long before it was New York.  Because we have the Internet, I know people there are having a hard time since September 11, like everyone else, but in their own anguished way.  Perhaps they feel the inner collapse that would follow from an equivalent attack.

Dam Square and the nearby Palace are rubble, but there’s still the life you wanted in Amsterdam to be lived.  The Eiffel Tower is taken down, but there’s still Paris the great capital and after all it is your home.  The British Parliament and the Buckingham Palace are blown apart, but traders in the City of London have to go to work and trade.  In Rome, the ancient Coliseum really is in ruins.  In San Francisco, the Golden Gate is gone from view.  Fill in the rest for me because I know you can.

What shall we call the politics that will save us from any of that?  Do you think it can be found somewhere in your prior categories?  Take every monumental city you know around the globe, and see it as a collection of targets.  Now tell me your aim is still steady after that.

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